Effect of position-dependent effective mass on optical properties of spherical nanostructures

The effects of position-dependent effective mass on the absorption coefficients (ACs) of spherical quantum dot (QD) and quantum antidot (QAD) have been investigated. We show that the radial position-dependent effective mass Schrodinger equation can be reduced into ordinary one-dimensional Schrodinger equation with some suitable transformations. Our numerical calculations are performed using both a constant effective mass and the position-dependent effective mass. The comparative approach is used for presenting the results of both QD and QAD models. It is found that not only for the effective constant mass but also for the position-dependent effective mass, the ACs curves corresponding to QD and QAD are considerably different in shapes and behaviors. Our obtained results show that the spatial variation of the electron effective mass can not be neglected in the optical ACs of both QD and QAD nanostructures.